win this thing?
At Temple University, he’d taken a course on psychology on his way to a political science major. He remembered a discussion on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the theory that basic physiological needs came first: food, water, shelter, basic survival, things like that. Then came safety. Sophisticated political considerations came much later, if at all. Was there a message in that for a counterinsurgency? Societies developed step by step and what you had at any given time was a Sudoku puzzle, with thousands of big and small imprecise evolving pieces. The ruler, whoever was on top, dealt for better or worse with what he had. In most times and places, retaining power was all-important. Sometimes rulers fiddled benevolently with the pieces. Sometimes they smashed them. Sometimes they didn’t care.
Two young soldiers walked over to the Pizza Hut stand, carrying their rifles and wearing their helmets. The security rules required that soldiers stay in this uniform in most places on the FOB. Wynn didn’t recognize the men. They had combat patches on their right shoulders, so they’d been in country at least a month. The pizza man slid open the stand’s window and Wynn smelled the rich spicy aroma.
Eighteen or nineteen years old maybe. Nations sent their young men to fight wars. Few of them had studied psychology or sociology or Middle East history or anything else like that. Few understood the puzzle pieces: the Sunni and Shia, the Arab and Persian rivalries, the history of confrontation between the Islamic and Western Worlds. Who in America really did? Academics, maybe. But even within that academic community differences were intense. Some political leaders, maybe. But they weren’t here. He and these young men, and other men and women like them, were here. They manned the front lines of America’s foreign policy, to work and fight—and possibly die—for political ideas. It was ironic, even cruel, that these ideas were imperfectly understood. Could that be enough to motivate men? There had to be something more.
Wynn had five or six years on the soldiers ordering pizza. A few years more of school. Maybe nature had given him better cognitive abilities and a better memory. Probably no difference in drive. Or in ambition. The two soldiers walked to the other side of the break area, holding their pizza slices and their guns.
The talk with Amir today had, again, confirmed the incredible complexity of the whole enterprise. Wynn wanted to think he’d made some progress—despite the great distances between them and us, language obstacles, huge cultural differences. And culture clearly mattered. Basic to everything was information. Information was available all around him, information about the area, the people, about the tactical situation on the ground. The question was how to absorb it and use it.
A sparkle of color on the ground caught Wynn’s eye. Curious, he got up from the bench, took a step, and bent down to take a closer look at the colored object. On the ground lay a thin inch-long strip of bright green-and-red plastic foil attached to a broken stick of black plastic the size of a toothpick. A piece of waste blown here by wind perhaps. He picked it up. It looked vaguely like a part of one of his grandfather’s old fishing flies.
His grandfather—Paps—had made his own flies. He liked red and green feathers best. “Good fishing requires attention to detail,” the old man would say. “That starts with first-class flies.” Attention to detail was critical for progress here in Iraq as well.
The other two soldiers got up from their table, their pizza and drinks finished. They glanced at Wynn, probably recognizing him as an officer. Did they wonder what he was thinking about? They would never guess “fishing.”
The cabin up in the woods where his grandfather did most of his fishing had a thickly shellacked oak countertop. Paps treated the countertop like an altar. On that
At Temple University, he’d taken a course on psychology on his way to a political science major. He remembered a discussion on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the theory that basic physiological needs came first: food, water, shelter, basic survival, things like that. Then came safety. Sophisticated political considerations came much later, if at all. Was there a message in that for a counterinsurgency? Societies developed step by step and what you had at any given time was a Sudoku puzzle, with thousands of big and small imprecise evolving pieces. The ruler, whoever was on top, dealt for better or worse with what he had. In most times and places, retaining power was all-important. Sometimes rulers fiddled benevolently with the pieces. Sometimes they smashed them. Sometimes they didn’t care.
Two young soldiers walked over to the Pizza Hut stand, carrying their rifles and wearing their helmets. The security rules required that soldiers stay in this uniform in most places on the FOB. Wynn didn’t recognize the men. They had combat patches on their right shoulders, so they’d been in country at least a month. The pizza man slid open the stand’s window and Wynn smelled the rich spicy aroma.
Eighteen or nineteen years old maybe. Nations sent their young men to fight wars. Few of them had studied psychology or sociology or Middle East history or anything else like that. Few understood the puzzle pieces: the Sunni and Shia, the Arab and Persian rivalries, the history of confrontation between the Islamic and Western Worlds. Who in America really did? Academics, maybe. But even within that academic community differences were intense. Some political leaders, maybe. But they weren’t here. He and these young men, and other men and women like them, were here. They manned the front lines of America’s foreign policy, to work and fight—and possibly die—for political ideas. It was ironic, even cruel, that these ideas were imperfectly understood. Could that be enough to motivate men? There had to be something more.
Wynn had five or six years on the soldiers ordering pizza. A few years more of school. Maybe nature had given him better cognitive abilities and a better memory. Probably no difference in drive. Or in ambition. The two soldiers walked to the other side of the break area, holding their pizza slices and their guns.
The talk with Amir today had, again, confirmed the incredible complexity of the whole enterprise. Wynn wanted to think he’d made some progress—despite the great distances between them and us, language obstacles, huge cultural differences. And culture clearly mattered. Basic to everything was information. Information was available all around him, information about the area, the people, about the tactical situation on the ground. The question was how to absorb it and use it.
A sparkle of color on the ground caught Wynn’s eye. Curious, he got up from the bench, took a step, and bent down to take a closer look at the colored object. On the ground lay a thin inch-long strip of bright green-and-red plastic foil attached to a broken stick of black plastic the size of a toothpick. A piece of waste blown here by wind perhaps. He picked it up. It looked vaguely like a part of one of his grandfather’s old fishing flies.
His grandfather—Paps—had made his own flies. He liked red and green feathers best. “Good fishing requires attention to detail,” the old man would say. “That starts with first-class flies.” Attention to detail was critical for progress here in Iraq as well.
The other two soldiers got up from their table, their pizza and drinks finished. They glanced at Wynn, probably recognizing him as an officer. Did they wonder what he was thinking about? They would never guess “fishing.”
The cabin up in the woods where his grandfather did most of his fishing had a thickly shellacked oak countertop. Paps treated the countertop like an altar. On that
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